McLaren F1

Formula 1 telemetry, on the road

The McLaren F1 was conceived and built to be the greatest sports car ever created. To achieve this meant it would need to be the most electronically sophisticated. Very early on in its development, we realised that on-board computing and processing would be vital to optimise engine management. ‘State of the art’ wasn’t going to be good enough. Given the level computing had reached in 1988, we would be looking far into its future for our solutions. Thanks to our design team’s capacity for lateral thinking, the F1’s electrical systems expanded into areas previously unexplored.

The most sophisticated car electronics ever

Faced with the problem of servicing the 100 F1s whose owners were often living thousands of miles from our UK base, we needed to devise a satellite communication and modem link, based on the remote systems we had developed on the race track. Way ahead of its time, our F1 diagnostic computer continuously monitored and logged a myriad of parameters, to identify and flag up any faults. In the event of the car breaking down, the McLaren factory can download the engine diagnostics, via modem, from anywhere on the planet. This function gave us some interesting data. One customer in Germany was (allegedly) found to reach 200mph almost daily on his way to and from work.